Online commerce has experienced dramatic growth in recent years and this growth is expected to continue into the coming decades. Internet service providers are, more and more, connecting users to the Internet at no cost, thus eliminating barriers to an Internet connection. At the same time, merchants are increasingly developing sites on the World Wide Web (or simply “WWW” or “Web”) that customers can access to order goods and/or services. It is now fairly common for a customer to browse a merchant's catalogue, select a product or service and place an order for the product/service, all electronically over the Internet. Similarly, it is becoming increasingly common for merchants to allow payment of invoices electronically. Typically, the invoice is sent electronically to the customer via electronic mail or made available to the customer over a network by providing the customer with network access capability.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,128,603 issued to Dent et al. on Oct. 3, 2000 describes a consumer-based system for analyzing, managing and paying electronic bill statements received from a biller. The biller electronically transmits a customized statement to a consumer's computer terminal over the Internet. The biller's electronic bill is presented to the consumer through a user interface. After reviewing the electronic bill the consumer can enter how much of the bill to pay, from which account to pay from, and the desired payment date. The entered information is then transmitted to the biller for processing. The contents of U.S. Pat. No. 6,128,603 are incorporated herein by reference.
Similarly, U.S. Pat. No. 6,070,150, issued to Remington et al. on May 30, 2000, describes an electronic payment system in which a biller electronically transmits a bill to a consumer over the Internet. The bill may arrive at the consumer's terminal via email or a through a notification for the consumer to check a billing mailbox. The consumer receives the bill that can be displayed in the form of a user interface. After reviewing the bill the consumer is able to enter the amount to be paid, the date of payment and from which account the money can be taken. The system described in Remington et al. also includes the ability to let the consumer dispute an item in an invoice. The contents of U.S. Pat. No. 6,070,150 are incorporated herein by reference.
A deficiency with the above-described systems for the electronic payment of invoices is that they are ill suited to certain business-to-business environments. In a typical business setting involving merchant entities manipulating large numbers of invoices, when a customer pays an invoice to a merchant entity, a check is written and sent to a post office box and directed to a lock box site. A check can be used to pay one or more invoices and is typically accompanied by remittance details to allow matching the check to one or more invoices issued by the merchant entity. The bank manages the checks received at the lock box site and keys in the remittance details into an electronic format that is forwarded to the merchant entity for further processing. The merchant entity applies the remittance details received from the bank to the accounts receivable to reconcile the customer account. For the keying of the remittance details into an electronic format, the bank charges the merchant entity a fee for the processing of each check. The fees can be significant without accounting for the delays in processing of the bank.
Consequently there exists a need in the industry to provide an improved system and method for providing remittance details and generating account reconciliation data regarding a customer account that alleviates at least in part the deficiencies of prior art systems and methods.